We are building a new home in the Laconia NH area. Winters are fairly cold here. That said there are a lot colder areas but a week to ten day long stretch of sub zero F is about average in this area. The house is a modular that exceeds the minimum insulation requirements by 50% per the builders calculations. It is a 36 X 28 X 8 ft cape style that will have a heated 2nd floor next winter that will be roughly 34 X 17 X 7.5 ft in size. The third dimension is the ceiling height. We also plan on heating half of the cellar for a daycare business. That would be roughly 17 X 28 X 7.5 ft. Obviously not a huge home but fairly good sized at a total of 2062 sq ft on the 3 levels.
My son is a heating design professional (commercial stuff though) and feels that a 60k BTU boiler should provide enough hot water for heating and a domestic hot water storage tank of around 30-40 gallons. That would be 3 heat zones plus a hot water zone on the boiler. I could drop back to the 3 zones for heat and a separate electric hot water heater if I need to.
Now you have the data, here are my questions:
1) Given the 30% instant rebate in NH for alternative/renewable fuel sourced heating equipment we are looking at pellet fired boilers. One I found has a MSRP of $5300. With installation and considering the rebate I think 4-5000$ would be the cost installed to run the main and cellar only at this point. The second floor would be a summer project to be completed by October so the little bit of fin tube up there (20 to 28 feet) and riser/return copper would be done later. So installed cost looks about the same as the quotes for a quotes for a quality oil burner. Does this seem accurate to you folks?2) Does anyone have any horror stories or reasons not to go with pellets?
3) Who in this area is a qualified installer? I would think any installer that deals with boilers should be able to do it. Truly the fuel source is the only major difference. And the Pellet boilers have 150 to 300 pound fuel hoppers attached to them so plumbing from an oil tank is taken out of the picture entirely.So I open the discussion. You folks have about 3 weeks to talk me out of/into doing this before I need to make a decision.
Thanks in advance.